Congress
Capitol agenda: GOP gets louder as Trump gets pushier
President Donald Trump has pushed Senate Republicans to the brink of their patience, and they’re not staying quiet about it.
The president in recent weeks has been firing out missives Republicans view as bad decisions that undermine their ability to deliver legislative wins as the midterms approach.
The latest irritation was the early-morning Truth Social post Wednesday, where Trump upended GOP plans to quickly confirm Jay Clayton as the new director of national intelligence and revive a key surveillance bill that the president already derailed earlier this month.
“The president’s timing and communication needs improvement,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said. “I think it’s unfortunate. It throws a kicker into the system when we get going and then we have to readjust.”
Trump’s U-turn on Clayton is one of several fronts where senators have pushed back in recent weeks. Republicans also foiled plans to fund part of his White House ballroom project in a recent immigration enforcement funding deal and forced the Justice Department to abandon plans for a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
Sen. John Kennedy answered “No” when asked if Trump takes senators into consideration: “He wants what he wants, and until he gets it, he just keeps pushing.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, who announced his retirement last year after breaking with Trump on policy legislation, said the dynamic is “undermining our ability to produce the very results he wants.”
The frustrations are also bubbling up as the president is trying to sell an Iran peace deal that a section of his party despises (more on this below).
To Trump, the solution is simple: None of this would matter if Republicans would just follow his lead.
Trump has handed Republicans a midterm playbook they’re unlikely, and unable, to heed: get rid of the filibuster, fire the Senate parliamentarian and pass an election security overhaul known as the SAVE America Act.
“If everyone just follows his lead, follows the blueprints he’s laid out, and runs on the record that he has, then I think we’ll fare well,” said a senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Trump’s controversial demands, however, have been unfortunately timed as lawmakers have been on the precipice of delivering policy goals. His naming of Bill Pulte as acting DNI, for example, blew up a brewing three-year deal on reauthorizing a key piece of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. His announcement of the DOJ payout fund delayed and nearly killed a critical immigration funding bill.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said his relationship with Trump was “fine” amid the public turmoil. He later explained in an interview the White House and Senate Republicans do a “fair amount of coordination.”
“But sometimes you get surprised,” he added. “It’s a business model the White House employs, and we’ve had to figure out how to be adaptable.”
What else we’re watching:
— TRUMP’S IRAN DEAL RACKS UP BIPARTISAN CRITICS: Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle panned the details of the memorandum of understanding Trump signed in hopes of ending the conflict in Iran. Sen. Bill Cassidy called the agreement “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” “Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive,” Cassidy posted on X. “Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped.”
— SENATE GOP COOL ON ‘RECON 3.0’: Senate Republicans have taken no concrete steps toward advancing Trump’s ask for a $350 billion party-line bill to fund the military and notch other conservative policy victories. Senators acknowledge the tough path for marshaling 50 votes behind such a measure on their side of the Capitol just months before the midterms. Members and aides in interviews this week said it was becoming clear any “Reconciliation 3.0” would be a House-led effort.
Jordain Carney, Meredith Lee Hill, Katherine Tully-McManus, Megan Messerly, Alex Gangitano and Myah Ward contributed to this report.
Democrats are finally catching on to how to talk to young male voters in the lead-up to the midterms, but the party can still up its game, one battleground senator and potential 2028er said Friday.
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) has been one of his party’s most outspoken critics on its handling of outreach to young men, who swung right and helped deliver the White House and both chambers of Congress to Republicans in 2024.
The party is now “definitely moving in the right direction,” Gallego said Friday.
“Like back in the day, I was like the only one,” putting out positions on men, Gallego said at a Washington event on young American men. “Now, like, it seems like everyone every week is coming out with a new position, new idea, which is great.”
Gallego has criticized Democrat’s failure to highlight mens’ struggles and their tendency to over-police mens’ ideas. But there are signs the political winds have shifted in his party’s favor.
A new Cygnal poll released with the event of men ages 18-30 who say they’re the most determined to vote revealed Democrats’ generic ballot lead over Republicans at 57%-40%, Blue Light News reported. The poll also said nearly 40 percent of respondents said they feel their lives are off track.
“We need to take the opportunity to invest in that portion of this country, to say that we care about them and actually try to change the trajectory of what’s happening with men in this country,” Gallego said at the symposium.
Still, the path for specific legislation targeting the needs of this demographic faces an incredibly tight calendar this Congress and is uncertain in the political landscape of next year.
A proposal from Gallego and Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) to establish a men’s health office within the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, has not advanced. Nor has bipartisan legislation from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who also spoke at the event, targeting education outcomes, college investment transparency and dyslexic student support.
A bipartisan group of 14 senators urged President Donald Trump to rescind his invitation for Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend the Group of 20 summit in Miami in December.
The letter, whose bipartisan signers were led by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chair of the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the invitation on Wednesday.
“President Putin bears sole responsibility for launching Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine,” the senators wrote in the letter. “Allowing him to participate in a G20 Summit in the United States raises serious concerns about legitimizing and normalizing a government that continues to attack Ukrainian civilian targets every day.”
The senators also noted that the U.S. has sanctioned Putin, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and others in the Russian delegation. If the U.S. does not join in isolating Russia on the world stage, Putin may not feel motivated to pursue a ceasefire and further negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, they wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment on Friday.
The letter surfaced following Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington that concluded Friday.
During the summit, Xi said he will meet with Trump two more times this year, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November and again at the G20 summit. Trump subsequently confirmed on social media that he will attend the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China.
Putin is also set to attend the APEC summit in China, and there were talks of a trilateral meeting there, Reuters reported earlier this month.
The Russian presidential press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter or whether Putin has accepted Trump’s invitation.
Senate Democrats have a decision to make about whether to grant a political favor to one of their most vulnerable Republican colleagues.
GOP leaders are expected to set up an initial vote Wednesday on legislation that would advise states on ensuring data centers pay for all their energy costs and grid updates. Democrats may discuss the matter at a weekly party lunch Tuesday, but so far haven’t had a caucus-wide conversation yet, several senators said in interviews.
The bill is being championed by Ohio GOP Sen. Jon Husted — who is facing a tough election bid against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. The measure easily passed the House last week with 206 Democratic votes, but campaign-season politics are making action trickier for the party in the Senate.
On one hand, voting to start debate on the bill could help keep Republicans off the campaign trail even longer and insulate Democrats against charges of politically motivated obstructionism.
On the other hand, a successful procedural vote could kick off an unpredictable amendment process and — as some Democrats see it — risk helping GOP leaders bail out an embattled candidate who has been inundated with data-center-themed campaign attacks.
“It’s an effort to rescue Husted’s campaign,” Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said in an interview, even as he acknowledged that he himself hasn’t yet made a call on how to vote.
Most in the party have yet to decide whether to lend their support, according to interviews with more than a dozen Senate Democrats and aides.
That includes in-cycle Jon Ossoff and known bipartisan dealmakers such as Jeanne Shaheen and Mark Warner, who all said Thursday they hadn’t made up their minds.
Sen. Peter Welch is so far the only Democrat to say he will support Husted’s bill, though he, like other Democrats, said “the bill didn’t go far enough.”
Sen. Brian Schatz, the Democrats’ deputy whip, said in an interview Thursday he found the bill “kind of weak” but that he didn’t have an announcement about whether party leaders would whip against it.
Two GOP senators, granted anonymity to describe private conversations, said that Republicans privately don’t expect the bill to get the votes needed to ultimately pass.
But Husted is keeping the pressure on Democrats publicly.
“They say they’re for more affordability,” he said. “This is a chance for everybody to prove it.”
What else we’re watching:
— JOHNSON, TRUMP SET MEETING WITH AI EXECS —- Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump will meet at the White House Tuesday with the executives of top artificial intelligence companies. Congress is under increasing pressure to put federal guardrails on AI development, but House GOP leaders continue to resist any major legislative action to address concerns. The speaker and president were in attendance at the state dinner Thursday night in honor of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, as were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. It was not immediately clear which of these executives would be invited to next week’s meeting, and who will be participating.
— SENATE GOP’S NOMS IN LIMBO: Senate Republicans’ hopes of getting several of Trump’s key nominees confirmed before they leave for midterm campaigning are still in limbo. The main GOP sticking point is Sen. Kevin Cramer’s blanket hold on nominations — including but not limited to Keith Sonderling for labor secretary — “pending a repeal of the Biden setback rule on fish and wildlife easements” in his state, the North Dakota Republican told Blue Light News. After weeks of a complete hold, Cramer lifted his blockade on some nominees after the Trump administration committed to reevaluating some of the Fish and Wildlife Service easements that restrict farming.
Jordain Carney, Amelia Davidson, Nico Portuondo, Mia McCarthy, Sophia Cai and Miranda Willson contributed to this report.
- Gallego grades Democrats on their midterm messaging to men
- Trump will hit several deep-red states in October campaign blitz
- Bipartisan Russia hawks urge Trump to pull Putin invite to G20 summit
- House Dems send health care wishlist to Jeffries
- White House eyes diesel fuel moves that fall short of export ban
- Poll: A crack is emerging in Trump’s coalition over deportations
- Capitol agenda: Dems weigh doing Husted a solid
- Democrats weigh how to handle data center vote that could benefit a GOP foe
- Gina Hinojosa wants to make Texas a test case for Democrats’ future
- Johnson, Trump set meeting with AI executives
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